Dish Network to pay CBS for carrying network

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Dish Network to pay CBS for carrying network

By Andy Fixmer
Bloomberg News Service



Dish Network Corp., the second- largest satellite-television provider, will compensate CBS Corp. for carrying its broadcast network, the most-watched in the country.
New York-based CBS and Dish reached a new carriage agreement for the flagship network and CBS's Showtime cable channel, Dana McClintock, a company spokesman, said in an interview. Francie Bauer, a spokeswoman at Englewood, Colorado-based Dish Network, confirmed a deal was reached and declined to comment further.
CBS Chief Executive Officer Leslie Moonves is seeking new revenue from pay-TV providers that retransmit the company's programs as advertisers cut spending during the recession. Time Warner Cable Inc., the second-biggest U.S. cable company, and FiOS, Verizon Communication Inc.'s fiber-optic TV and Internet service, reached similar carriage deals with CBS last month.
CBS, controlled by Sumner Redstone, fell 22 cents, or 4.2 percent, to $5.03 at 9:42 a.m. in New York Stock Exchange composite trading. The shares had dropped 36 percent this year through yesterday. The company reports fourth-quarter earnings today.
During negotiations in 2004, when CBS was part of Viacom Inc., Dish removed the network from its satellite feed for two days leading up to college basketball's March Madness men's basketball playoffs.
With shows including "CSI: New York" and "The Mentalist," CBS is the most-watched television network in the season that began in September, and the only major broadcaster to increase its prime-time audience.
CBS negotiates retransmission agreements in markets where cable, satellite and telephone companies provide a signal to subscribers from a station owned by the company, McClintock said. CBS announced a five-year retransmission agreement with Time Warner Cable on Jan. 6 that compensates it in markets where the network owns local stations including New York, Los Angeles and Dallas, and a "long-term" carriage agreement with Verizon six days later.